


Neon Black

by lavenderjacquard



Category: Original Work, Taylor Swift (Musician), dorothea - Taylor Swift (Song), evermore - Taylor Swift (Album)
Genre: Angst, Based on a Taylor Swift Song, Dorothea (evermore) - Freeform, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Gaylor Swift, Pining, Prom, Sapphic, Unrequited Love, circa 2010
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 00:01:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29251128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavenderjacquard/pseuds/lavenderjacquard
Summary: We sit together in my car in the abandoned parking lot, humid air seeping through open windows, and wonder why the people we loved didn’t love us back.
Relationships: Dorothea/Narrator, Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 12
Kudos: 10
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Neon Black

**Author's Note:**

  * For [possibilityleft](https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilityleft/gifts).



The neon sign, framed by a crack in my windshield, blinks the color of alien slime against the night sky. I cock my head, squint, and the words blur to Pepto-Bismol ooze. If I turn my vision foggy, then it’s not a thirty-foot-long arrow screaming  _ Tupelo!  _ like it’s better than Disney World and Christmas smashed together, but somewhere else entirely. Chicago, Havana, Shangri-La.

Dorothea blows out a puff of smoke and the image turns hazy.

“Take my phone,” she says, and throws it at me like it might explode. “I can't look at the photos on Facebook.” Her voice is thick but I keep my gaze on the sign. She doesn’t like people seeing her cry, unless she’s onstage.

I hide her phone in my side door cup holder. “You’re too good for him,” I say for the hundredth time.

“Prom’s for losers, anyway.” She shoves a fry in her mouth and washes it down with a swig of peach schnapps, all while keeping the cigarette expertly balanced. Adelaide would notice if we took the whiskey.

I finger the purple sequins on my gown and ignore the prick of guilt. Dad gave me a hundred dollars to spend at Marshalls, and that plus the seventy for the ticket is too much. But I’d look stupid standing by myself, circles of blush staining my cheeks and too much eyeshadow, flats sticking to the floor.

“I’m pretty sure I’d puke if I saw him dancing with Inez.” She passes me the cigarette and folds her arms, rustling her blue charmeuse gown. There’s a faint pink stain on the filter. I touch my lips to the same place. Dad’s going to kill me when he smells the smoke.

“Imagine! I just storm up to them on the dance floor, probably grinding - no room for Jesus, mind you!” She waggles a finger and I snicker. “I’d put my hands on my hips and the music stops. No one speaks.” She holds up both hands, index fingers and thumbs touching, a conductor ready to begin. I hold my breath.

“The crescendo! I spew chunks everywhere!” She makes a horrible gagging sound like a cat hacking up a hairball. “Fish tacos and fuzzy navels all over that stupid spray tan of hers! And he’s definitely the kind of dick who wears a white suit.” She deepens her voice in her spot-on imitation of Nick. “Woah, woah, babe. Babe. Don’t be, like, such a bitch. Dude. Let’s just, like, chill. Listen to some John Mayer.”

I cackle. The smoke singes my throat, but I can’t stop. I don’t want her to stop.

“Your body’s, like, a wonderland, babe.” Dorothea slaps her hands over her heart and her voice turns saccharine. “‘I love you!’ Christ. Never meant it. Worst thing I’ve ever heard.” She deflates into her seat. “I promise you, we are never, ever, ever getting back together.” Leaning over, she takes the cigarette from me, the blue crystals accentuating the swell of her breasts glimmering in the neon glow. “I don’t want to be one of those girls in college stuck with a high school boyfriend.” 

“Good.” I squint at the sign again. Now it screams  _ Nashville! _

After taking a drag of the cigarette, Dorothea passes it back. I notice a chip in my nail polish, the tip of my left ring finger. She painted my nails even though I gnaw at them. She talked about Nick and how he needed to buy her a corsage, moving my fingers casually like every touch didn’t send sparks flying right to the pit of my stomach. 

We should never have become friends. Her, the theater star with a four-octave range and me, the girl always scribbling in her notebook with a spread of four A.P. classes. We’d been placed next to each other in Latin class junior year. I took it for the SAT vocabulary help. She took it because Mr. Weissman was a poor man’s Jake Gyllenhaal.

A few weeks into October, when the humidity finally broke and we could raise our hands without the fear of revealing damp patches, we sat in silence copying vocabulary words.  _ Vacca _ , feminine, meaning cow. Pronounced  _ wa-ka, _ since the Latins switched their Vs and Ws. Vaccine. I declined the word, adding and subtracting letters according to the chart on the board, and set my pencil down. My eyes drifted over to Dorothea. She had her nose to her notebook, eyes squinted, a sliver of tongue peeking out, until she suddenly straightened and placed down her pen, sly smile curving her lips.

No words, but a drawing. A cow stood on two legs dressed in sagging pants and dark sunglasses, chains dangling from its neck. Flames danced behind it. Above, in angular text:  _ Vacca Flocka Flame _ .

I laughed so loudly that everyone looked up and Mr. Weissman did that disappointed head shake that teachers never gave me, and my cheeks must’ve burned redder than the leaves outside. But Dorothea stared at me too, that sly smile now directed towards me, and right then I finally understood what all the other girls meant when they doodled boys’ names in their diaries and whispered about kisses.

I let her copy my homework and she spotted me at the pizza place down the street from school. She let me hear her songs first, before she filled up the cassette tapes, and I read her my stories before they were done beneath the bleachers when we’d skip gym class. I didn’t fit in with her friends, all blonde and tan with spider-leg eyelashes, a balding teddy bear shoved on the shelf between porcelain dolls. But she took me down and said I was her favorite.

“I’m just counting down the days until I leave. Adelaide wants to take me shopping.” She gags. “Sure, if I want everything I own to be pink and glittery.”

She’s going to school in Nashville, going to pick some bullshit major and play the lead in the college troupe’s production of  _ South Pacific, _ and all the boys with greasy hair and acne scars will gaze at her with stars in their eyes. She’ll work at a bookshop and sing at coffee shops and seedy bars. I’m staying here. Dad can’t afford anything more than community college. I take a drag of the cigarette and pass it back. It feels like my life ends here, fading to dust as the sign cycles through a rainbow of colors and the cicadas keep buzzing. Nobody wants to read the words of some girl stuck in the Mississippi mud who couldn’t pull herself out.

“I think I’m gonna change my name to Thea. It sounds sophisticated. I think it’s, like, Greek or something.” 

“But you’re not Greek.”

“Whatever. No one really cares, anyway. And it’s not like anyone from here’s gonna follow me and call my bluff. No one who matters is going to know.” She realizes her mistake, grimacing just as my stomach turns icy. My wrist starts itching, but I ignore it. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean-”

Her phone buzzes, rumbling in the cupholder, and she dives across my lap to retrieve it.

“Ugh! No, Ah-duh-laide, I didn’t win prom queen because I  _ wasn’t there. _ ” She groans. “Fuck you. Like, sorry I didn’t want to be like you and have being crowned Miss Mississippi the greatest achievement of my life. You know, I hope whoever won was like Lindsay Lohan in  _ Mean Girls _ and just broke the stupid thing up.” She throws her phone in her lap and tosses the cigarette butt out the window. “God, I hate this place.”

“Me, too.”

“I’m tired of everyone and their big fancy houses and Lilly Pulitzer and the gossip and the ‘don’t be ugly’ bullshit. You know, when Father Bill goes on about Satan and Hell and getting pitchforks shoved up your ass, I want to scream, ‘Buddy, we’re already here!’”

I laugh. She’s right. We both never fit in here; her because her dreams are too big, and me because I could never quite figure out how to not be ugly in everyone else’s eyes.

“Remember, five year plan. California. I’ll have a Grammy and you’ll have a book deal and people there will be educated and  _ progressive. _ ” She says the word with reverence. “Not this backwards shit.”

I’m not sure how realistic that goal is anymore. For her, sure, but not me. 

“I’m sorry I made you skip prom. Your dad was so cute when he took the pictures.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t really want to go anyway.”

“Yeah, but you were going to use it for research. Write about all the stupid things people do. In that style you were talking about? Dunzo?”

“Gonzo.”

“Right! That’s the guy who got Johnny Depp to shoot his ashes out a cannon. Will you do that for me, when I die?”

I don’t want to think about her dying. It feels a little like it, her leaving. When Mom got sick Dorothea didn’t look at me like everyone else did, like if they moved too quickly I’d shatter into a million pieces and they’d be stuck gluing me back together. They’d crinkle up their eyes and smile with too much teeth and coo, “She’ll get better soon!” even though we all knew she wouldn’t. After Dad and I unhooked the machines I ran to Dorothea’s house and sobbed into her nice silk shirt and she said nothing, just rubbed my back in circles, over and over. She didn’t stop, not even after I’d counted a hundred circles and Adelaide kept sighing loud enough for us to hear, since well-bred girls were not supposed to touch like that.

Suddenly Dorothea seizes my hand. “I’m really going to miss you.”

Her palm is sweaty, eyes glassy and rimmed with red, the beginnings of tears balanced on eyelashes. Her lips are parted, trembling, like if I lean in just a little further I can catch the air leaving her lungs. If I kiss her now, she’d taste like peach schnapps and salt and that fruity pink lip gloss she likes. The sign is frozen at deep red, waiting for the tear to drop and for me to decide. Before it was like vodka mixed with cherry cola and popcorn, and her palms were cold and dry on my shoulders when she pushed me away.

But I look down. I remain still like I always do and beat down the voice that demands I be brave, be bold, be like her. I can’t make the same mistake twice, even though the first time didn’t feel like a mistake. I can’t risk losing my only friend, leaving me to see visions of her disappearing at bus stops. And I don’t think I could bear it if I never saw her name pop up on my phone, making that tiny screen come alive with the sound of her laughter, her light obliterating the heavy fog that likes to settle over my chest in the night and strangle me.

Besides, I already know us together won’t work here. Neon black, an impossibility.

“Oh, gosh. My mascara’s going to run.” Dorothea lets go of my hand and pulls down the sun visor mirror, dragging a finger under her eye. She can’t possibly see herself. It’s too dark. 

“Hey! I’ve got an idea.” She reaches down and fumbles for the ratty white cardigan I keep in my car. It’s got stains and a hole in the elbow and doesn’t smell like Mom anymore, but I don’t mind when Dorothea wears it. It might start to smell like her, instead.

She jumps out of the car and totters toward the sign, her stilettos making a  _ clack-clack-clack _ on the pavement. I get out too but stand still, watching her hair shift from turquoise to sunset orange. She turns and waves, smiling, not like she’s competing in a pageant again but like we’re at the lake and she wants me to come see some weird fish or pretty rock she found. This is how I want to remember her, the warm, sticky air settling on my cheeks and not the cold rush when she pulled away, not the too-wide eyes and loud laugh when she said we should just keep watching  _ Titanic _ .

Dorothea beckons me over, swaying slightly. She’s already put her phone on the ground and the song sounds like it’s playing from out of a tin can, the one about you and me and all of the people that we danced to at junior prom last year. I walk over, ignoring the pinch of my too-tight shoes, and she takes my hand again, pressing the stars on her wrist against my own, constellations melding. The tattoos were her idea, and she went first to prove that I could do it, too. I needed something to hide my tangle of scars.

“Don’t you forget about me,” she says as she rests her head on my shoulder. I can feel her lips form the words against my collarbone.

I smile into her hair. Neon black. “Impossible.”


End file.
